Skip to main content

Heresthetic attention and democratic trust: how integrity salience shapes accountability in Greece and Cyprus

Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher: Professor Margarita Katsimi

Duration: March 2026 - February 2027

Democratic accountability increasingly depends on shifts in public attention between policy performance and political integrity. In many European democracies, corruption allegations, governance failures, migration pressures, and rapid media cycles have made public trust more volatile. Greece and Cyprus provide a useful setting to study these dynamics. Both are consolidated EU democracies that have experienced repeated crises which repeatedly redirected public debate between competence and integrity. Understanding how these attention shifts influence trust and electoral behaviour is therefore crucial for analysing democratic resilience.

Political science research shows that voters evaluate political actors along multiple dimensions, particularly policy performance and perceived competence or integrity. Agenda-setting theories suggest that political competition depends on which dimension dominates public debate, while behavioural models of limited attention indicate that citizens give disproportionate weight to information that becomes salient in the media environment. Analysing periods of major crises and shocks in Greece and Cyprus therefore provides an opportunity to examine how attention to integrity and policy performance emerges, fluctuates across media cycles, and shapes political trust and electoral accountability.

This study aims to:

• examine whether increases in media attention to integrity issues are associated with declines in institutional trust, analysing how changes in integrity salience affect citizens’ trust in government.

• link changes in trust and media attention to electoral behaviour and leader evaluations, testing whether periods of heightened integrity salience correspond to lower evaluations of political leaders and reduced support for incumbent parties.

• introduce a regional perspective to identify the impact of external shocks, examining whether areas more exposed to external shocks—particularly migration inflows —display stronger shifts in voting behaviour and political narratives, consistent with strategic shifts in political attention.

The construction of indicators of political salience will provide valuable tools for monitoring the information environment in which democratic accountability operates. By identifying how shifts in attention influence trust and electoral behaviour, the project contributes both to academic debates on democratic resilience and to policy discussions on transparency, crisis communication, and institutional governance.

Research Team

  • Prof Margarita Katsimi

    Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher: Margarita Katsimi, Professor, Department of International and European Economic Studies, Athens University of Economics and Business

  • Dr Antonella Ianni

    Co-Researcher: Antonella Ianni, Associate Professor in Economics, University of Southampton